Abstract
‘More sinn’d against than sinning’ — so King Lear surmises his station.1 Exiled within his own lands, the wayward monarch cries out against the ‘undivulged crimes/Unwhipp’d of justice’ (KL, Act III, sc ii) and calls upon the Gods for retribution. It is not to be. By the close of King Lear — Shakespeare’s most desolate of plays — the audience is presented with no evidence of justice, offered no hope of trial or verdict that might lessen the weight of tragedy. Instead, in its final moments we are confronted with a vision of near-apocalyptic proportions, a vacuum of politics and heir that reveals all to be ‘cheerless, dark and deadly’ (KL, Act V, sc iii). By the play’s end, characters both good and evil alike have suffered punishment, and those who remain are merely that — remainders, loose ends burdened by the realities of concatenation, however traumatic such continuation may be:
The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel not what we ought to say. The oldest hast borne the most: We that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (KL, Act V, sc iii)
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Notes
William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act III, sc ii. All references taken from Shakespeare, The Complete Works (London: Heron Books Ltd, 1957).
See Lyotard, ‘Judiciousness in Dispute, or Kant after Marx’, The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History, ed., Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p 65.
See Dunn, ‘A Tyranny of Justice: The Ethics of Lyotard’s Differend’, boundary 2, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring 1993), p 196.
See Hent De Vries, ‘On Obligation: Lyotard and Levinas’, in Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory Volume III, eds, Victor E. Taylor and Gregg Lambert (London: Routledge, 2006), pp 76–100.
We can find here clear parallels with Levinas’ ethical concept of saying — the presence of the face of other (a feeling that anests totalisation) that secures responsibility before becoming a said, itself resisting use but giving cause for its application. In slight contrast to Lyotard however, ‘rather than accept next that the purity of saying’s intentions will inevitably be compromised and subordinated once saying enters into the service of the said... Levinas insists that verbalization does not exhaust the signifiyingness of saying’. See Sean Hand, Emmanuel Levinas (New York: Routledge, 2009), p 53.
See entry on ‘Pagan’, by Peter Brown, Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, eds, G. W. Bowerstock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1999), p 625.
Thomas Docherty The Lyotard Dictionary, ed., Stewart Sim (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp 158–9.
As David Carroll comments: ‘To define what a phrase is would be to situate it in terms of one of its regimes — to reason, know, describe, tell, question, show, command, etc. — at the expense of its place in others.’ See Paraesthetics (New York & London: Methuen, 1987), p 164.
Plato, Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (London: Routledge, 2004), Book 7, 817c.
Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems (California: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp 19–20.
See Rodolphe Gasche, Saving the Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy (California: Stanford University Press, 2007), p 284.
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© 2014 Dylan Sawyer
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Sawyer, D. (2014). Housed Exile. In: Lyotard, Literature and the Trauma of the differend. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383358_3
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